No, count me among the children of hippies who want their CMA to be alive like it was meant to be. Everyone knows that once you've trained with Aliveness, many forms of dead training become obvious and boring. I still credit Matt for helping me and many others see the difference more clearly; the way Matt stacks the different methods next to each other, it's hard to miss.

But, no sacred cows at Bullshido, right? Matt is dressed like a freshman, sporting his new hemp bracelet and trying to find the Earth Foods market and talking about psychedelic drugs in between guillotine choke demos. You can't set up jokes like that....you just have to wait and strike when the iron is hot!

You are part of that new Hippy CMAer. The I understand Aliveness I fix my broke art by myself.

Originally Posted by W. Rabbit

the way Matt stacks the different methods next to each other, it's hard to miss.

So? If the 99% bothers you go join that 1% CMA school. In my area I'd say that alive JMA, KMA, and CMA hovers at 1% in totality. That's all of them combined not separately. I've been to numerous states, on the West Coast and the good schools are few and far between. To get upset at a generalization is silly. I'm a CMAer that rarely recommends CMA schools because an inordinate amount suck. Then you have the ones that attempt to interject aliveness, that sounds like you, into a long dead art. IMO that is worse because you have a bunch of people creating a whole new subgroup of shitty fighters.

But, no sacred cows at Bullshido, right? Matt is dressed like a freshman, sporting his new hemp bracelet and trying to find the Earth Foods market and talking about psychedelic drugs in between guillotine choke demos. You can't set up jokes like that....you just have to wait and strike when the iron is hot!

Matt is one of my instructors at the Portland SBG, and he tied the blue belt around my waist. He's a fantastic coach, but more than that he's a fantastic coach of coaches. He excels at teaching how to teach, and he excels at explaining why some things work when others do not.

I just wanted to chime in on some of the misunderstandings of Aliveness I see some people have. There's a great analogy Matt gives about reversing the training methods of JJJ and BJJ, and the effect this reversal would have on the athlete's performance. If a class of JJJers trained with BJJ methodology (live full-contact sparring, focus on improving performance) for a year, they would perform well in competition, and what they performed would look and feel similar to BJJ. Contrast this with a BJJ class doing JJJ or Small Circle type training (two step sparring, lockflows, choreographed movement, no resisting opponents), that class would be ineffective in competition compared to the alive JJJ group, despite having the "superior art". This is borne out by numerous online videos of JJJers using their art in full contact matches.

It is the training method, not the art. No one would give a boxer who had never sparred a chance in a boxing match. No person would bet on a wrestler who'd only wrestled dummies. The reason why boxing and wrestling (and Judo, MT, BJJ, Sambo, etc) are seen as superior arts is that they have always trained alive, because the goal is to win in competition against other similarly skilled opponents. Many TMA's do not have this goal, and so, over time, the art becomes more and more disconnected from reality, more and more diluted by fantasy.

Matt doesn't really care if you train BJJ, at least I doubt it. His point is that you should train like BJJers, wrestlers, and boxers train. Train to win in full contact scenarios, against fully resisting opponents in the context of actual combat. Any BJJ white belt of 1 year would maul someone with 5 years of dead, non-resistance training in any art on planet Earth. I personally could probably take a boxer who'd never sparred live, and I can't box for ****. But what boxer has never sparred live? See? A person who had never sparred live is not a "boxer", because boxing is a martial art defined by its necessarily alive nature.

There are some really great clips of Matt's training philosophy on Youtube, comprised of pretty much the entire last disc of Functional JKD 3 if I'm right. I'll link to "Why Aliveness", which is kind of a mission statement.

Any of the videos in that playlist are gold. Oh, and just to chime in on the comments on Matt's supposedly disheveled appearance. Two things, first thing is that the guy travels internationally on a more or less biweekly basis, and two, he doesn't have to answer to, or impress any other man on Earth.

Welcome back. The misunderstanding is on your end. We are dissecting the generalities he leveled in that video and why he used it as a talking point.

In some cases it is the art. Yes, I would take a boxer, who never sparred, over a TMAer doing forms and static drills against each other. Heck, in some cases I'd take the non-sparring boxer over some of the CMA schools I've visited or attended.